Reading and math scores of urban students are improving, especially in math, according to a NAEP (National Assessment of Education Progress) study of 11 cities. Low-income students do significantly better on the federal test in some cities than others, notes Kevin Carey on The Quick and the Ed. In fourth-grade math, 31 percent of low-income New York City students reached the proficient level compared to only 15 percent in Los Angeles, 12 percent in Chicago, 10 percent in Cleveland and 7 percent in Washington, D.C. Furthermore, Cleveland and D.C. exempted a relatively high portion of students from the federal test for disability and language reasons, probably inflating scores.
Low-income fourth graders in New York City are more than four times as likely as low-income students in DC to be proficient in math, twice as likely as Los Angeles, and significantly better than all the rest.
Some 77 percent of low-income students in Charlotte, Houston and New York City tested at the basic level or higher in math with Boston and Austin close behind. In D.C., only 43 percent reached basic or beyond. “New York City and DC, which bookend these lists, have almost exactly the same percentage of students living below the poverty line, 29%,” Carey writes.
. . . some of these districts are just a lot better than others. New York City, Boston, and Houston, which are consistently in the top half of cities on the NAEP, have all won the Broad Prize for Urban Education in recent years. The cities in the bottom half haven’t, and for good reason.
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Matt Yglesias has the charts.
Demographics isn’t destiny, says Education Trust.
Dramatic disparities in student achievement exist between districts serving similar student populations — suggesting that school- and system-level decisions matter a lot when it comes to the achievement of poor and minority students. For example, low-income African American students in Houston score 23 points higher in eighth-grade reading than low-income African American students in Los Angeles. To grasp the magnitude of this gap, the national achievement gap between African American and White students is 26 scale score points.
None of these cities is doing really well educating low-income students but some cities are doing a lot better than others.
Send your NAEP data questions to Associate Commissioner Peggy Carr at Associate Commissioner Peggy Carr at tuda2007questions@ed.gov. She’ll respond at http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/2007tudachat.asp.
Yeah, and Cleveland, where I taught for many years, WON’T improve until it doesn’t count against math teachers (who are predominantly white) to give the Cleveland students HONEST grades. Currently, and for some time, if teachers gave true grades, only a very few (maybe 30%) would pass the class – and many of those would pass with C or less.
But, the schools can’t have that – so they pressure the teachers to fudge the grades. Enough years of that, and you have the situation I often encountered in high school science – students who had trouble managing fractions, division, decimals – even when not in a word problem.
In my experience, when pushed unrelentingly, students WILL succeed. But, along the way, they will whine, complain, threaten to “get your job” (kid, some days, you could HAVE it), and bring administrative pressure into the class.
The other problem is, Cleveland, for years, had ALL the over-16s in the high stakes test. In Cleveland, any failing stays in 9th grade – no promotion. So, it’s possible for the to be tested each year, no matter whether or not they attend even as little as once a week. I’m suspecting that the numbers will raise, now that they test in 10th grade. They won’t be testing many of what we used to called “veteran” 9th graders.
The tests Joanne is talking about are tests of fourth graders. Linda’s description of the situation in Cleveland high schools may be accurate, but it tells us nothing about why Cleveland fourth graders perform so poorly compared to their peers in other American cities.
The Broad Prize is a sham, NYC won it recently and they have overcrowded schools and poor test schools.
Houston was caught claiming to have produced a “miracle” but it all turned out to be smoke and mirrors.